How to Write a Reflective Essay? Useful tips for Cool Essay

03 Jul 2017

The modern system of education assumes lots of research and writing activities. Students have to cope with numerous tasks, starting from quizzes and up to dissertations.

Writing reflective papers is one of the most common assignments for college and school students, which requires us to look at our experiences and analyze how those situations had influenced us as individuals. These types of essay are a bit different from the classical ones. Although they have to contain similar elements, writing an essay on some of the popular subjects like nursing, business, engineering, science, math or other is simpler.

Why? The answer is obvious – it is easier to find strong arguments on the common topics while writing a text about yourself but making it unique and interesting is more complicated!

If you were assigned to write a reflective essay but don’t know for sure how to do this, read this article ad you will find answers to some of the most common questions and learn how to create the best essays!

What Is A Reflective Essay?

Before we can talk about the requirements of this task, its format, structure, and main distinctive features, we should try to understand the definition of it to know what we are required to create. A reflective essay is a paper in which the author has to describe a particular situation, event or experience, analyze it, and explain how he had grown, changed or developed during it.

Why Do You Need To Make An Outline?

Any work starts with a plan. Writing this type of paper is not an exception, and thus, you should create a detailed outline before you can start working on the content of your work – this way, the writing process will be quite simple.

What Is The Standard Structure Of Such Work?

The structure of this paper is quite standard. Like any other essay, it should be short and straight to the point, and consist of only three main components – the opening clause, main part, and conclusion. The first and last parts usually consist of only one paragraph, while the main body can include two or more paragraphs depending on the requirements of your teacher.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each section:

Introduction. In this paragraph, the student specifies the main goals of the text, states the topic and makes a thesis statement that makes a small insight into the content of the work.

Main body. This is the rubric, where you will be giving details of the situation or event that you are talking about and explain how it had influenced you, what changes you have experienced, etc.

Conclusion. The last paragraph has to summarize all the information provided earlier and give the answer to the main question – “how did the author change after this situation.”

Where To Find A Reflective Essay Template?

Those students, who had never faced the need to perform such task in the past, may face certain concerns regarding the appearance and style of such texts and, in this case, you should search for some good examples! The easiest way is to look on the Internet! You can simply open the search engine, type a request like “reflective essay sample” in the search line and look at the results that you get.

How can you benefit from such examples? Looking at a high-quality example, created in accordance with the universal standards of reflective writing will give you a clear understanding of what your teacher expects to get from you. Also, such templates will help you structure and format your paper properly, but, in this case, you should ensure that the format and style of the example that you’ve found meets the requirements and guidelines given to you!

Last, but not less significant benefit – you can find inspiration! If you lack the inspiration to perform the paper – simply look at a few samples, read what other students wrote about, and, hopefully, you will generate some good ideas for your text!

How To Format Your Work Well?

There are no general formatting requirements. As a rule, your teacher should specify which format you should use for this particular work and, if he or she doesn’t – you can either ask this question or choose any of the basic formats. The most important nuance here is to know the demands of the required format, so don’t hesitate and refresh your memory by reading the requested format’s guidelines!

Final Words

Reflective writing can be rather fun. Of course, not all students find it easy to write papers of this type. If you are not able to perform the work on your own – it doesn’t mean that you can give up on it at all because this way you will probably fail the task and get a low grade. Instead, you search for alternative solutions!

One of the smartest and fastest solutions is to find a professional writer, who could do all the work for you and guarantee that you will get the highest grade.